Lives of Kings by Lucy Leiderman

Author:Lucy Leiderman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2014-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

“Kill you?” he asked. “But I thought you couldn’t be killed without coming back again?”

“So did I,” I said. “Once we’re in the ritual. We never figured out how to get out, apart from having our souls and magic enslaved to others.” Which wasn’t a very appealing option. “This describes how to stop that ritual, but there’s a pretty big catch.”

We needed to destroy that rock as quickly as possible without anyone finding out about it. The thought that the Godelan could have beaten us to it and already seen it made me itch to just run out and smash the thing.

“What did it say?” Kian asked again.

“The whole thing sounded like it was written for us,” Seth said. “As if the Riada realized that even when we found the Godelan, we might not know what to do with them. It said there are many deaths. The sacrifice of magic, that thing they tried to do to Gwen, was one of them.”

Kian glanced at me, another apology in his eyes.

“Or we could die like anyone else,” Seth said. “But then we would still continue somewhere in the future. The ritual starts the pattern and it’s hard to break. Then there was something written about the ring of fire that trapped our souls.”

Yeah, I remembered that ring of fire.

“But,” Seth continued, “it said that we can only be set free, I take that to mean made officially dead, by the same ritual and the same blood that trapped us in the first place.”

This seemed to mean something serious to the others, but I was clueless. I hadn’t thought this last part actually held meaning for them until I saw their grim faces and suddenly felt left out.

“What?” I asked. “What does that mean? What blood trapped us?”

“There’s blood used in the ritual,” Seth explained. “Just a little bit. You were … late. You didn’t see.”

In our past lives, Seth and I had been due to run away together. We were going to abandon our tribe and live out the rest of our lives in exile just to be together. It hadn’t been my finest moment as a champion.

That day went horribly wrong, however, or right — depending on how you looked at it. After my husband began to suspect what I was about to do, he tried to stop me. I had to kill him. Maybe. Either way, I had fought him off and ended up stabbing him with a gift from Seth.

I was late to meet Seth; he had thought I couldn’t go through with it, and I realized too late that he had gone back to our tribe to die. Not being able to stand the thought of living without him, I dove into the ritual through the circle of fire at the very last moment, inheriting fire as a new magic.

“Our father,” Kian told me, “provided his own blood to perform the ritual.”

“Well, we’re two thousand years away from your father,” Moira said. “How can he kill us?”

“That can’t be what it means,” I reasoned.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.